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Author: Wilson, Edward

Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

Published on 4 August 2022 by Quercus Publishing (MacLehose Press) in the United Kingdom as part of ‘the William Catesby’ series.

Paperback | 304 pages
130 x 197 x 23 | 218g

A spy thriller that will change your view of the Cold War forever, by a former special forces officer who is ‘poised to inherit the mantle of John le Carré’ ‘Edward Wilson seems poised to inherit the mantle of John le Carré’ Irish Independent’More George Smiley than James Bond, Catesby will delight those readers

looking for less blood and more intelligence in their spy thrillers’ Publishers WeeklyAugust, 1956. A generation of British spies is haunted by the ghosts of friends turned traitor.

Whitehall spymaster Henry Bone has long held Butterfly to be the Holy Grail of Cold War Intelligence. His brain is an archive of deadly secrets – he can identify each and every traitor spy as well as the serving British agents who helped them. And now Bone learns that Butterfly plans to defect to the Americans. Unless Bone gets to him first.

William Catesby, a spy with his reputation in tatters, is pressured into posing as a defector in order to track down Butterfly. His quest leads him from Berlin, through a shower of Molotov cocktails in Budapest, to dinner alone with the East German espionage legend Mischa Wolf.

‘A gripping Cold War story centred on a Berlin seething with agents and counterspies’ Mail on Sunday’Smart, finely written’ Publishers Weekly Starred Review’All you could want in a spy thriller’ Oliver JamesPraise for Edward Wilson:’Stylistically sophisticated . . . Wilson knows how to hold the reader’s attention’ W.G. Sebald’A reader is really privileged to come across something like this’ Alan Sillitoe